reading matters: bloggige roundup

Matthew Ingram has been on a bit of a tear of blogging recently at his several active blogs. 

At Woebot, there's been thoughts about Eno's own thoughts on technology and politics, and about music and AI, and a sweet photo blog about a trip to Margate by bicycle.  Oh and I almost forgot: a cool post about Mike Oldfield and Virgin Records, triggered by an old (well 2014) Mike O doc on YouTube that Matt recommends.

At Sick Veg, he enthuses about a particularly nutritious grain and flour. 

And best of all at Hollow Earth - which I didn't even know was a blog - Matt has a lovely recollection of favorite animation from his childhood. This is prefaced by a run-through of some of his own work as animator (most of which I was completely unaware of, with the major exception of his Vitamin C film).  

Fascinating stuff about the raw techniques used by Bob Godfrey for Roobarb and Custard. 

Surprised by his abreactive feelings about Bagpuss: Smallfilms's Firmin and Postgate are celebrated instead for Ivor the Engine. 

Because of our age difference, I only have vague recollections of some of the other cartoons-for-kids that Matt rates, such as Paddington. 

Matt closes with some good thoughts about how this relatively crude analogue-era animation lead to  outcomes far more magical than the slick seamlessness afforded by digital technology: 

"What unites all the British animation of this period and my own scruffy work could be summarised as: everyday settings, whole films made by a few people (in my case one person), handmade models or hand-drawn imagery, animation breathing life into the inanimate, and fundamentally a demand being placed on the viewer's imagination."

The old skool animators understood "the gratification of labouring on something, and through that labour literally bringing things to life."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And here's some more notable bits of recent reading:

Michaelangelo Matos at Beat Connection has a cool post on the New Romantics (which I blog about here)

Mark Richardson at Beauty Blew A Fuse has some sweet thoughts about Erik Satie, Harold Budd and Aphex Twin. 

Geeta Dayal gives the Adele Bertei book No New York an interesting mixed review at 4Columns. 

Doubling back to animation, John Coulthart at { feuilleton } has a nice post about an animator I love, Piotr Kamler 

Me own flesh-and-blood, Kieran Press-Reynolds the Remorseless Writin' Machine has written about  twenty things since I last posted about their output.... But their most recent effort is this Rabbit Holed column on a genre that rejoices in the name Hardtekk and is all bound up with looksmaxxing and edits on TikTok etc. 

Over at The Quietus, Tim Burrows has a nice piece about the film he and Simon Poulter have made about Mark Fisher, titled We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (in which I appear briefly as a disembodied voice) 

Torpedo the Ark's Stephen Alexander has a post amusingly titled You Are Reading a Post About Making A Film About Mark Fisher - although at the time of writing he had yet to see the film, it's triggered by an article on Fisher and the doc at The Guardian. 

Promising new blogger Mister Magpie with a bunch of essays worth checking out, especially the one on Grouper. 

Neat post by musicologist Ethan Hein on The Band's "The Weight" - a song I loved as a child, oh-so-precociously recognised as different in atmosphere and gait from everything else on the radio (it was a medium-sized hit single in the UK, would you believe!). 

Talking about Canadians... as already noted at the Retromania blog, Split Infinities has a very interesting and evocative piece about Boards of Canada - written and posted shortly before, but now uncannily in synch with, the "are they returning or not" hoo-ha of recent days...  which deploys concepts like "Corduroy Psychedelia" and "PBS unconscious".

Great mix by DJ Food aka Kevin Foakes weaving together BoC and their source material + lodestar coordinates 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Good lord, talking about nostalgia, as BoC inevitably involves...  this post is itself some kind of flashback to the olden golden days of blogging, when people linked each other and commented and kept the whole collective enterprise bubbling onwards in synergistic-symbiotic incestuous group-mind fashion... 

Well, not quite: I haven't coughed up much in the way of substantive commentary on most of these blogposts, but.... it's the thought that counts, eh? 

Harold Budd RIP

 Here's my NPR tribute to the wondrous and wise music of Harold Budd.

Who lived in South Pasadena and who I ran into on the street briefly a few years ago when I was out walking with Geeta Dayal (who knows everybody). By all accounts, he was as lovely a person as his music.

(See bottom of post for choice quotes by Budd and about Budd)

                                            

I reviewed the Cocteaus collab The Moon and the Melodies in  '86 - I'm not sure I had a very clear idea who Harold Budd was then.  The LP was the spur for some very flowery imagery. Maybe I'll dig it out later if it's not too embarrassing.... 

Cheeky Harold put out the same piece twice under different names, in the same year. You can see why though, what a beauty. 

Another Moon + Melodies lovely.

Cocteau Twins "Eyes Are Mosaic ft. Harold Budd", as if this was a modern rap'n'B record! YouTube is pretty darn lax as an archive - of course it should be credited to Harold Budd. Elizabeth Fraser. Robin Guthrie. Simon Raymonde. 

Eternity... 

His music lends itself to the infinitely extended remix 

Facts I wish I had known so that I could have included in the piece

That he taught himself to play the piano in his late thirties, in order to be able the music he wished to compose. 

Things Harold said

"Being immediately pretty is the most important component."

"I really like to find as much life as possible in the smallest amount of material. A very simple scale, a relationship of note against note, especially a sustained note; I milk everything for all it's worth."

"One of the things was I got profoundly upset and bored to death with the avant-garde music that was being practiced around the world—the Western world—at that time. It seemed self-congratulatory, and for a small cadre of snobs, and I refused to go on with it."

"I really minimalised myself out of a career"

 I cannot play the piano. I can play what I play, I can play me, but I have a dyslexia when reading music. I’m not a professional musician. I hack away at it and the piano is convenient. By no means would a proper pianist consider me one.”

"I slipped back into discovering something that no-one else was doing, or was likely to do in the very near future. I divorced myself from modern music in a sense, and began to develop a language which I thought was honest to God me, and totally outside of competition with my fellow composers.”

"I admire painters very much and I secretly wish that I were doing that"

"“Brilliant blasts of colour that simply engulfed you” - on Mark Rothko, Ellesworth Kelly, and other painters he admired. 

"It's curious about The Plateaux of Mirror. It came so quickly and so easily that it was kind of a phantom"

"This whole 'new age' business is very distasteful to me. I don't like being even considered in that “category and I have almost no respect for it at all... It's very lightweight and very bothersome to me. .. I don't think it has anything to do with the actual truth about the meaning of the music”

"That one frosted my balls so much. I was just enraged every time I’d walk into a Tower Records or Virgin Megastore or something like that. There I was in the new age category and I just thought ‘Jesus Christ, how can I escape from these mindless bastards?"

"When I did the White Arcades album, I went to the studio with a list of titles and that's all."

 "I've never worked with musicians who know how to read music. So that's always swell for me,

"A mature artist ought to be able to make a good record from the contents of a cutlery drawer."

"The one collaboration that never occurred and never would occur would be David Sylvian, whose work I admire above all others. I just love everything he does. There is a really good reason, it’s because although one thing is good and another thing is good, putting them together doesn’t make it twice as good. In fact it could be a disaster, and I’ve never wanted that to happen."

Things people said about Harold 

"A great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician" - Brian Eno.

"I would set up a sound, he would improvise to it, and occasionally I would add something: but it was mainly him performing in a sound-world I had created”  - Eno, on The Plateaux of Mirror.

“Harold Budd's intention was to make what he called "eternally pretty music", and his way of composing was to write a piece of music, then take out all the notes you didn't like! - Eno

"He was really down to earth, a ham 'n' eggs kind of guy" - Cocteau Twins, via David Toop.

LA events - Loop summit + Mark Fisher panel discussion

Busy week approaching, as I participate this weekend in all three days of the Loop summit - Ableton's annual gathering for musicians, producers, technologists, educators and pundits, which this year is being held in Los Angeles for the first time. Then, a few days later, I join a panel discussion in celebration of Mark Fisher's life and work, pegged to the publication of the massive Repeater anthology, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. That's at Stories Books & Cafe in Echo Park.


LOOP

Friday 9th November  -  "Rewind / Fast Forward"  - 2:15pm – 3:15pm

I'll be speaking about "the past, present and future of musical innovation" in a video-illustrated talk

Location: Montalban Theatre (Main Stage), Hollywood.

Saturday 10th November - Listening Session - 2:00pm – 3:30pm

I'll be commenting on tracks submitted by summit participants. Moderator is David Reid. 

Location: EastWest Studios (Lounge 2), Hollywood.

Sunday 11th Nov - "Sounds like tomorrow: making music for the future"  - 6:00pm – 7:00pm

I'll be joining  Equiknoxx and Coco Solid + moderator Craig Schuftan for a panel discussion 

Location: East/West Studios (Studio 1 Stage EWS)

Loop schedule 

Loop participants

Loop locations

MARK FISHER (Tuesday November 13 - 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm)

To mark the publication by Repeater Books of K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher - which includes a foreword by myself - I join Meagan Day (of Jacobin) and Geeta Dayal for a panel discussion in celebration of his life, work, and legacy.  Mark will be present not just in spirit but in video form. 

Location - Stories Books & Cafe, 1716 W Sunset BLVD, Los Angeles, CA  90026

Information - 213-413-3733

i thought there was some unusually interesting music here and there in The Hunger Games when i saw it at the weekend

turns out one of the bits is a vintage track by Laurie Spiegel

Geeta Dayal has the story here at Wired



conversely, and more typical of Hollywood sdtrk output these days, is there anything more putrid than the instakitsch soundtrack of Avatar? it's a sort of science fictionized exotica: according to Wiki "composer James Horner recorded parts of the score with a small chorus singing in the Na'vi language in March 2008" and "worked with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist, to create a music culture for the alien race." Horner "took advice from his assistant and they put an unusual amount of virtual instruments in this project"







an aural palate cleanser is required after that swill -- here's some more Laurie Spiegel